Dereje Desta: “Next to African Americans, the Ethiopian community is the largest black community.”
Photo credit: Arielle Witter

Merchaw Sensahw: “I knew that a lot of people were asking for Ethiopian food, and there was nothing here, so that was my dream to bring one business to Adams Morgan.”
Photo credit: Merchaw Senshaw

For many college students, the neighborhood of Adams Morgan may conjure images of bars, tattoo parlors and quaint coffee shops. But for the members of the Ethiopian community, this neighborhood is home. A walk down 18th Street Northwest still reveals these smells and sights, a hint of spices, an array of colors – and a community of people committed to sharing and embracing their culture.

Merchaw Senshaw is part of that community. Senshaw, the owner of Quara, an Ethiopian restaurant in the area, said the United States has been home to him for the last 20 years. He has found the Adams Morgan community to be welcoming and friendly. But Senshaw’s move to open a restaurant in Adams Morgan actually came out of a challenging situation.

Senshaw came to the United States on the recommendation of a friend, but, in 2008, that same friend had to shut down his restaurant in Adams Morgan as a result of the recession and increased rents in the area. This wasn’t the only closure to happen in Adams Morgan during the financial crisis. Adams Morgan lost several other Ethiopian restaurants, inspiring Senshaw to fill the void with his own establishment.

The Migrant Heritage Commission is a non-profit, service-oriented organization that recognizes and preserves the cultural identity and rights of Filipino immigrants, grew from this moment of need. It has since grown to serve the growing and geographically scattered Filipino immigrant community across the D.C. Metro area in a wide variety of ways, from cultural education for the second generation to aiding victims of human trafficking.

Kat Savchyn was 10 when her family moved from L’viv, Ukraine. / Photo by Edward Graham

Kat Savchyn was 10 years old when her family emigrated from L’viv, Ukraine for the United States. Along with her sister and her mother, the family eventually settled in Alexandria, Va.

Now 25 years old and working as a data scientist for a consultant firm in Washington, D.C., Savchyn said she was too young at the time to grasp the full magnitude of their move, but she was able to adapt relatively quickly to her new surroundings.

“I didn’t really have a good understanding of what was going on, but when I went to school I acclimated really quickly,” said Savchyn, who attended the Alexandria City Public Schools. “There were a lot of foreign kids in school with me, so I guess I organically adapted to the culture and the people and the language.”

Although the D.C. region does not rank among U.S. cities with the largest Ukrainian populations—data from the U.S. census shows that New York City has the highest total of Ukrainians in the country—the region nevertheless boasts a proud Ukrainian heritage.

According to data from the Center for Demographic and Socio-Economic Research of Ukrainians in the United States, just over 18,000 people of Ukrainian heritage live in the metropolitan D.C. area. The majority of this population—close to 13,000 people—were born in the U.S.

Savchyn says her mother remains in touch with the Ukrainian community through church in D.C., but that she isn’t as in tune with the local community. While she still maintains a slight accent, Savchyn is perfectly fluent in English and can also speak Ukrainian, Russian and Polish, often drifting between all four languages when speaking with her mother or sister.

Before the two-level Target opened its doors, before the Metro station began picking up and dropping off passengers on the next block, before the new tenants moved into the freshly painted condominiums and lofts, a tiny plot of land existed on 14th street and Columbia. More than a decade later, it remains here still.

More than a decade earlier, it was on the cusp of being transformed.

The tiny plot of land at CentroNia, a community center in Columbia Heights, brought together Lola Bloom and Rebecca Lemos. First as high school students volunteering after school at CentroNia, then as colleagues learning to garden in the same plot of land, later as confidantes – and ultimately as partners in their non-profit organization.

Before Bloom and Lemos entered the picture, children at CentroNia used the parcel of land out front as a play area. A one-time summer program turned it into a garden, but that didn’t really go anywhere when the outside group that started the garden didn’t return. Employees at CentroNia asked Bloom and Lemos to do something about the plot of land. Neither had any idea what to do with it.

“I just remember I was walking around in circles like, what am I going to do here?” Bloom says. “And there was a lot of trash and a lot of beer bottles. There was weird stuff I was digging up all the time. And I was like, ‘OK, let’s get the kids out,’ and the kids where all over the place because I didn’t know what to tell them to do, and it was a little chaotic.”

More than a decade later, Bloom is using that same parcel of land to teach gardening classes at D.C. Bilingual Public Charter school, which is operated out of CentroNia.

Sitting in the teacher’s lounge in the basement, Bloom doesn’t get much of a break. Children pop their heads into the lounge to say “hi” or ask her a question. Like a mom used to having her kids interrupt “adult” conversations, she answers patiently.

The mostly self-taught gardener is wearing blue jeans, sneakers and a worn-out gray hoodie under an apron that could pass for a springtime dress. It reaches to her knees and it is printed with yellow and pink flowers. Bloom’s maple-brown wavy hair is parted in two lose buns at the nape of her neck. Sometimes she rest her long fingers on her temples thinking, such as when she reminisces about the growing pains of evolving from an amateur to an experienced gardener. Her metallic blue nail polish is starting to chip at the tips.

Her first summer working on the garden, Bloom says, she planted lots of marigolds. According to Bloom, that’s the only plant she really knew about. Bloom says her father drove her to The Home Depot where she bought 20 marigolds and planted them, in addition to some sunflowers and petunias.

“I did not know what I was doing. I put everything out there, directly on the soil. No mulching, watered it a bit and hoped for the best.”

Similar to Bloom, Lemos admits she went into gardening knowing nothing about it. Lemos is squatted on top a blue classroom chair in the computer lab at CentroNia. Her navy blue sunglasses don’t last long on top of her head. She pulls them off and plays around with them while shifting her legs from under her, first tucking them under, then crossing them.

Lemos compares her first gardening experience to her first kiss: She doesn’t remember either one. But after getting her first taste of gardening, she says, she remembers getting “ridiculously hooked” on it.

Lemos says she became so enamored with gardening that, since she couldn’t drive a car yet, she used a folding shopping cart to take three bags of manure she bought at a hardware store to the garden. For several blocks, Lemos pushed the cart from Adams Morgan to Columbia Heights.

“So [the bags] smell bad, kind of ripping out a bit. I’m trying to maneuver it [the cart] around the sidewalks just to get these bags of manure to this little plot of garden,” Lemos says.

Through trial and error, they got the hang of . The activity they enjoyed during their time off from high school and later college turned serious. Bloom says the summer before graduating college, the two had a meeting and decided to team up instead of alternating their work on the garden during the summertime. According to Bloom they asked themselves, why not make gardening their lifestyle? Why not make gardening their full-time jobs?

Both women got their hands on gardening books and participated in workshops. In 2003, they considered formalizing their gardening work as a non-profit and in 2004 they carved out a mission statement. Three yeas later, they officially founded City Blossoms. So far, they’ve grown eight gardens in Columbia Heights, Takoma Park and Baltimore. Their newest gardening project is located in the Shaw Neighborhood in NW D.C.

Bloom and Lemos took on community gardening before its recent resurgence across the country. According to the American Community Garden Association, there are between 18,000 to 20,000 community gardens nationwide and the number is rising.

However, when the pair experimented with gardening in the late 1990s, other area groups were already engaging in community gardening in D.C., according to Judy Tiger, the former executive director of Garden Resources of Washington (GROW).

“What makes them stand apart is they way they integrate hands-on gardening, education and art. I don’t know anyone else doing that [in D.C.]. That makes them real special,” says Tiger, whose non-profit helped start and fund community greening projects for more than a decade. Lemos and Bloom both credit Tiger for teaching them the fundamentals of organic gardening.

“They really put the children right in the center,” Tiger says about Bloom’s and Lemos’ approach to gardening. According to Tiger, combining hands-on gardening and hands-on art motivates the children to learn.

“They don’t do classic standard community garden. They are pioneers in that regard,” says Katie Rehwaldt, with the national non-profit, America The Beautiful Fund. Rehwaldt also sits on City Blossoms’ board of directors.

Rehwaldt says that using art in the garden sparks the children’s creativity and gardening can be used as a tool to facilitate learning in different academic subjects.

Bloom studied art in college and incorporates it into the curriculum she develops for the gardening projects. For one of her classes, Bloom had her pre-kindergarten students read the children’s book, “Planting a Rainbow,” which is about a mother teaching her child how to grow flowers in a garden. The students drew their own flowers as pages for the book. The students worked on their literacy skills while learning about gardening, Bloom says.

Lemos is also trained as an art teacher Lemos says that at first it can be a battle to get the children to feel comfortable in the garden because they tend to complain about the “icky” factor of putting their hands in the soil and getting dirty.

However, she says, “If you get rid of that and if you are willing to explore getting a little dirty that means you’re more willing to explore, more willing to experiment, take in your environment and do and touch and experiment, which in turn leads to creative thought process.”

The gardening work Bloom and Lemos perform in Columbia Heights also confronts a reality of this neighborhood – crime. Bloom says when they started the first garden, she viewed it as a peace-building tool that provided children with a safe outdoor space.

“I could never say planting a seed stops a bullet because that’s not true and never will be,” Bloom says. “But I think it’s just a matter of getting kids to think in more peaceful ways and how to interact with each other in more peaceful ways.”

Overtime, as their interest in gardening intensified, so did Lemos’ and Bloom’s friendship. Initially, Bloom admits, there was some tension.

“Rebecca goes to art school, so do I. Rebecca studies abroad, so do I. Rebecca does this, so do I,” Bloom says in a taunting voice. “Everyone was always like, you should be friends with Rebecca and I was like, screw this!”

Lemos says this is a constant in their friendship, “How do we keep our individuality when those arounds us want to compare? I even made t-shirts that said ‘Robola and Lobeca’ because it was the joke that were were interchangeable.”

For Lemos, the initial tension was more about learning to share a plot of land that they both had fallen in love with individually, and both felt very protective of.

But the more they worked together, Bloom says they just clicked.

Lemos agrees.

“This is what I imagine marriage to be like.” She adds, “It’s a very nice balance between the two of us. I hope marriage is like that because it’s not so bad if it’s like that.”

Bloom looks at their partnership as an example of women working well together.

“I think that’s what great about what she and I do. It’s walking the talk. You know, women can join forces and it doesn’t have to be my nonprofit versus your nonprofit and my goals versus your goals. We can take advantage of each other’s strengths and make each other rise up together.”

The cars were parked in the spaces clearly labeled, “15 minute customer parking ONLY.” Yet this was a daytime rule, one that, at 25 minutes after midnight, had no authority — much like the rule that anyone wanting food from a grocery store must enter during operating hours, fill a cart with unblemished produce and pay for it.

On this particular spring night, the Trader Joe’s in Falls Church, Va. — or, rather, its dumpster, was the first stop for the cars’ occupants. As it turned out, it wasn’t even necessary to go into the dumpster — nine shopping carts surrounded it, filled with bulging plastic bags. Inside were discarded loaves of Tuscan Pane bread, zucchini, oatmeal, chocolate chip scones, pita bread, naan, a package of brownie cookies, strawberries and some non-edible items, including a Trader Joe’s T-shirt, wrapping paper and some greeting cards.

Two men wearing authoritative-looking florescent yellow and orange vests approached. If they were store employees or security, the group would be asked, or more likely ordered, to leave.

Conservative Group Makes Over Image, Goals, After Passing of Health Care Bill

By Ladan Nekoomaram

Jim Casey, a retired grandfather carrying an American flag lawn chair, walked through the doors of the Ronald Reagan building on the morning of April 15 with purpose.

Hundreds of protesters close to his age crowded the great hall like a sea of tourists waiting for the fireworks to begin on the Fourth of July. Fanny packs, oversized flags and glittered hats filled Freedom Plaza that morning, ringing in the Tax Day Tea Party protest that was said to bring hundreds of thousands of conservatives together against government spending and control over the private sector.

Casey greeted his fellow retired comrades in the movement that has been described by FreedomWorks as the biggest grassroots political movement in recent history. But today, unlike a much-publicized Tea Party rally in September, he was also met with the faces of today’s youth, standing alongside their grandmothers and grandfathers, on a school day, to say they’ve had enough.

“I think if I don’t do something now, I’m going to be stuck with these policies throughout my life,” said Riley, a sophomore in college who did not want to give his last name. He and his cousin flew in on a red-eye flight from California to the protest.

“I want the feeling of being part of something and actually taking action and being part of a bigger group,” Riley said.

Casey was once the standard face of the Tea Party, but now, he embodies just a faction of what the movement has come to be in recent months, since the passing of Obama’s health care bill. He brought his sons and grandchildren from Gloucester County, Va., for the protest and made it a family affair. They purchased the signature red “Tea Party Patriots” t-shirts while one of his granddaughters sported a light pink shirt that read, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.”

“We want to show that we are concerned … the health bill, that’s the real big one,” he said. His mother’s doctor told her that, “at 92 years old, she probably won’t be able to be seen or have insurance to pay for it.”

Those who attended the rally on Sept. 12 witnessed a largely white, older crowd, primarily from southern or Midwest states, waving anti-Obama signs and screaming that their voices should be heard.

On Tax Day, however, the face of the Tea Party looked different, featuring a larger number of women, students and minorities, united under the message of smaller government and fiscal responsibility.

Most importantly, the new faces of the movement say they have taken it upon themselves to be leaders in their communities and weed out members touting racist, homophobic and fanatical ideas that sour the goals of the movement.

Banners waved through the warm, spring day by Freedom Plaza in the mass of protesters listening to speakers like U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), whose voice rang over the crowd.

“Freedom is my No. 1 issue, and I’m losing it one piece at a time,” said Julie Hall, who flew in from Arizona. She took time off from her business to attend with a friend, Hilary McGee, a teacher who left her family and her students behind. Hall said she has participated in Tea Party events in her state, but that wasn’t enough to enact change.

Many protesters took the overnight flights from across the country, missing work, school and spending hundreds of dollars to protest. While some tea partiers have been active online or in their communities, others felt it was important to be in government’s back yard to spread their message.

“I think the statement of being on the home turf of the people that are not listening to us … do you see us now? What part of ‘no‘ do you not understand?” Hall said. “I don’t want to be rolling over in my grave worrying about this country.”

They came from far and wide for different reasons, but the Tea Party has coalesced around three central beliefs: small government, fewer taxes and less spending. It has also gained momentum from three main goals that have kicked the movement into high gear: Take back Nov, 2, gain a bigger following and weed out those misrepresenting the party.

Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns at FreedomWorks, said 25 percent of Americans associate themselves with the Tea Party, while a New York Times poll says 18 percent of Americans are Tea Partiers.

They form local chapters through the thousands of online and social networking groups that have formed within the past year. After forming these communities, he said it’s important to reach out to other demographics, like those in urban or rural areas and minorities.

“We have to focus on recruitment,” said Steinhauser, encouraging Tea Partiers to network with each other while at the day’s events. “It’s this kind of social connectivity that has made this movement so powerful.”

The movement’s new focus was evident earlier on the day of the protest, when Matt Kibbe, the head of Freedomworks, spoke to hundreds of conservatives, families, senior citizens, mothers and students booed loud enough to fill the room with their frustration.

“Has anyone here given up? Is anyone double the energized,” he said through the echo of cheers. “Now’s the time to turn grassroots action into political accountability for all members of Congress,” he said. “If we can’t turn November 2 into a referendum of Obamacare, then we will have truly lost.”

Kibbe emphasized that at this stage, the movement has become a 50-state strategy.

According to a New York Times and CBS News poll on April 14, Tea partiers tend to be more affluent, educated, male and have families.

But for Andrew Hoffman, a recent graduate from Mary Washington in Virginia, the ideals of the Tea Party, or fiscal conservatism, have been a part of him his whole life. Coming from a mixed political family, Hoffman was raise under a roof of different political ideologies. But he found himself aligning more with his father’s conservative views. He remains a minority of in his age group, but represents the growing number of politically active conservative youths in the country.

Hoffman participated in youth conservative groups throughout high school and college, and he went door-to-door last November during the Virginia gubernatorial elections. He also worked for U.S. Rep. Frank Wolfe (R-Va) in 2008, getting his feet wet with politics on the Hill.

He’s since gotten a non-political job, so he said he hasn’t been as involved in political movements as he’d like to be, but he participates in the online communities.

“I’ve had the opportunity to get active and it kind of lent me a voice in this,” Hoffman said of his campaigning last fall. “I mean, yes, I’m joining the voice of thousands and thousands of others, but it gives me a voice behind just saying, ‘Hey, don’t blame me. I voted for McCain.’ You have this bottled up sense of frustration in the Republican core and this basically gave them a chance to say ‘Hell, no! We don’t like this.’ ”

He urged the public not to assume that Tea Partiers want no health care reform, but rather, they want it executed through the free market.

“From what best I can tell, there is a general sentiment that there needs to be health care reform within the Tea Party,” he said. “But it’s not that they’re saying, ‘Don’t do any reform whatsoever.’ But rather, they’re saying, ‘This is the wrong reform being done in the entire wrong way.’ ”

Derek Spencer, a senior at the University of Mississippi, has focused his efforts locally, getting conservative representatives elected on the state and federal level in his home state, Missouri. He rounded up supporters by starting his own website for youth in Missouri who believe in the ideals of the Tea Party.

The site, which launches in May of 2010, would include a database of voters, news about local politics and a social media component that will connect conservative students with one another on various campaigns. With a bachelor’s degree in political science and extensive work in grassroots organizing, Spencer said he’s putting his hopes on the 2010 and 2012 elections.

“I would do all kinds of things, like go around to neighborhoods, make phone calls and hold fundraisers,” he said of his experience during the 2008 Presidential election. “For the website, it’ll start as a small, local thing, but I’m going to focus on getting it down and expanding it.”

He said on the Ole Miss campus, he has noticed a growing number of students following Ron Paul and libertarian leaders who align with fiscal conservatism.

“I do see a lot of young people become more liberty-minded,” he said “The more and more these blogs come about, it’s kind of more transparent what’s going on than watching the evening news. There are so many resources, so you can dig down and get all the information you need, and they’re turning to these places for unity and a purpose.”

Youth and older generations formed social groups through FreedomWorks prior to the protest, organizing their local groups on the Mall before the evening speakers presented. At Freedom Plaza, mothers pushing their children in strollers crowded busy intersections, students taking a day off of school and young professionals filled the crowd with new and unexpected faces.

Counter-protest groups like “The Other 95 percent” also came to the protest to debunk some popular myths its members say have spread and become integral to the movement. They yelled, “Thank Obama for your tax cut,” at protesters passing on the street, saying a significant portion of Tea Partiers received tax cuts in 2009.

Alex Nowrasteh, a policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said misrepresenters of the party have been discouraged from attending the events, but there is no way to regulate who comes and what they do.

He and his business partner, Drew Tidwell, are working to create a feature- length movie about the different faces of the Tea Party in hopes to create a more holistic depiction of the movement. The film, not related to his work as an immigration expert at CEI, would be a fictional representation of the Tea Party across the country from California to Washington, D.C.

Nowrasteh and Tidwell have attended various Tea Parties around the country, trying to determine who embodies the movement, and along the way, they were surprised with their findings.

“Middle-aged women are basically running the movement. People who were never concerned with politics before,” he said. While this may be the case, they are also highlighting youth initiatives within the movement and how that will come to define the next generation.

“There are a lot of movies about Woodstock—so we want to talk about our generation, the youth, and our movement’s Woodstock.”

His motivation for pursuing such a project was to clear the air on misinformation and stereotyping that occurs in the media with Tea Partiers. He hopes the film would also weed out the more radical members who focus on social or unrelated issues that turn people off to the movement.

“They focus on things like race or religion, and there are some people like that. But a vast majority of them are not like that and we want to portray that accurately.”

In the past, someone attending the protests would see a number of anti-Obama signs that refer to his race, Muslim middle name or identity as a U.S. citizen. On Tax Day, few such groups attended but remained outliers, like Teresa Cao, founder of “Heaven’s Bailout.” Her group believes that the “New World Order,” or a singular governing body, got Obama elected to spread corruption and anti-Christian values. She focused on the birther issue during the protest.

“Every movement has these people,” Nowrasteh said. “I wish they would leave or get kicked out, but you can’t really kick people out. There’s no membership roster and you don’t have to pay dues or fees. But the rest of us can talk about how much we hate them.”

One of the biggest beefs he has with people who dislike the Tea Party is when people associate them with being racist because they oppose a black president. Others who try to associate religion and homosexuality with the rallies harm the movement’s intentions as well, he said.

FreedomWorks held a discussion on Tax Day explaining to Tea Partiers how to best deal with those who misrepresent the movement and how to direct reporters to voices of authority. Voice control is one of their main focuses in the coming months.

Lee Doren, the “crasher in chief” of Bureaucrash, an activist project of the CEI, says the radicals that have come to define the movement in the media are characteristic of most grassroots movements.

“If you go to a football game that has a couple thousand people, and you have some crazy drunk people with their shirts off, would you like people to say that’s a representative of what a football fan looks like?” he said. “Everyone’s upset and embarrassed by them. But at an open event where you’re encouraging the public to come, you can’t ask them to explain why they’re there.”

The media in general, he said, hasn’t done much to counter the radicals in the movement, and have in fact put them in the spotlight. Reports of cut gas lines, rocks thrown through windows, and people with Obama “Joker” masks make the front pages of the news rather than the average protester and their economic argument.

“Because quite frankly, moms with kids in strollers are not a big story if you got somebody with Obama and a Hitler mustache,” he said.

Doren started as a liberal while in undergrad and worked at an environmental lobbying organization until he went to law school, where he was “completely converted.” He joined the Tea Party’s efforts last year and has attended rallies on the local level and gave a speech at the Sept. 12 protest.

While the movement looks to the November elections, its face continues to form from the once-disorganized hodgepodge of Republicans, libertarians, former Democrats, social conservatives and radicals. The youth and the older generation are leading the way in their backyards and in the political sphere, movement organizers say, determined to get the true message across and vote out political supporters of Obama’s economic policy.

“Things have changed dramatically in a year. People now understand what you say when you say ’Tea Party Movement’ now,” Doren said.

“I mean, it’s only been around for a year and look how it has grown. How many other movements in America can you say has had this much influence in less than a year out of nowhere? None, really.”

Amid changes, some things at D.C.’s Southwest Waterfront and Seafood Market remain the same

By Joseph Liu

Sung Kim sits, poring over over his book in his dimly lit office. Printed across the pages are diagrams showing the energy flow of the human body, an ancient belief that is used in diagnosing ailments. An old computer hums loudly next to him and the green LED light flickers erratically. Even with the window open, the brightest source of light is the computer monitor.

The swaying is unnoticeable from the inside, but his office is situated on the barge in the water. Depending on the water level, market workers will line the dock with wooden steps so that customers can get a better look at what they are selling. Like the constant flowing ocean, the historic Washington D.C. Southwest Seafood Market has changed, and only the steadfast can truly understand what kind of place it is.

“I feel like I’ve been living in this place for my whole life,” Kim says. “But I’ve only been here for six years.”

Just south of the Tidal Basin and a few blocks from the Jefferson Memorial, the historic Southwest waterfront has been a destination for those seeking fresh seafood for centuries. Located at the intersections of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, the waterfront has attracted settlers since before the United States was a country.

According to the Southwest D.C. Web site, Pierre L’Enfant, the surveyor and planner for D.C., called the area “a magnificent entranceway.”

In 1918, the Municipal Fish Market provided space for 24 merchant stalls and an office for the Department of Weights, Measures and Markets. These stalls replaced the sailors that would dock at the pier and sell their goods right off the boats.

Paul K. Williams writes in his book,“Images of America: Southwest Washington, D.C.,” that as Washington became more populated, the southwest area of the city started attracting the poorest residents. Worried that the area would become a slum, urban planning concepts molded the area into an innovative apartment and cooperative living community.

Photographs and news clippings from that era show a much bigger Seafood Market than is there now. In 1958, Garnet W. Jex, a graphic arts and painter, chronicled the change in Southwest D.C. in slide presentation titled, “The Bulldozer and the Rose.” This presentation featured pictures of the old Southwest waterfront with boats lining the docks and signs boasting, “Jumbo Hard Crabs”

Lida Churchville, Historian for the Southwest D.C. Neighborhood Assembly and librarian at the D.C. Historical Society, believes that some culture was destroyed during the 1950s renovation.

“A lot of people left and never came back. … There was a whole Jewish community… that’s never come back,” she said.

A lot of buildings, including churches and synagogues, were destroyed, but she does understand why.

“Some of the buildings that were torn down, and today we would love to have back, were probably ugly to the people back then,” she said.

Currently, four businesses occupy the Seafood Market. Three out of the four are family-owned and have been there for generations. The fourth business is owned by a Sung Kim, a Korean immigrant who, following in the footsteps of immigrants before him, has settled in the waterfront to make a living.

He speaks slowly and thoughtfully. Lazy th’s and r’s, roll off his tongue. His face is almost child-like, but his skin is lightly traced with wrinkles.

His eyes give off a tiredness that reflects his life. Short and stocky, his body looks as if it holds power. His hands, kept mostly in his pockets, are thick and callused with work.

“1980 I came [to America],” he says as he thinks back on how he came to own Pruitt’s Seafood.

His dream was to own a business in America, someplace he could call his own. As many immigrants have, he opened a drycleaning shop. While working, he said, he injured his back and could not continue to do manual labor.

He decided to change careers and bought a seafood restaurant in Alexandria. Because of this restaurant, he made many trips to the fish market. Every time he came, the market was packed and busy.

“It was a once in a lifetime,” Kim said about his purchase of the market.

With only three other shops in the area, the location is amazing, he said.

Later he discovered that he might have been too optimistic.

Seafood is a seasonal good, with different fish and crabs coming and going. Prices change with the season and there is never a guarantee that you will have goods to sell.

“That’s why the seafood business is very hard,” he said. “Sometimes 40 dollars for a bushel, sometimes 120 dollars.” Not only do the costs of a bushel of crabs change, but the size of the crabs change as well.

You can open up a bushel and it will only be full 50 percent full, he said.

“This is America, can you believe it? When you pay the top price, the quality is the bottom,” he said.

He does have hope for the future though. As tourist season arrives and the weather clears up, he hopes that business will pick up as well. News of renovations to the waterfront also lifts his spirits.

After the urban renewal of the 1950s, the waterfront has changed very little. Concrete hotels that bear the marks of time are scattered next to the fish market. Restaurants with solid but worn porches lie all the way up to the water’s edge.

In 2010, a new renovation project is scheduled to begin. Malls, apartments, parks, open spaces, upscale stores will all be part of this project. Most importantly, according to the Southwest D.C. Waterfront Web site, this project will be about the water.

“The redevelopment will transform the marina and channel area to optimize both water traffic and views,” it announces.

Paul Harrison, manager at Jessie Taylor Seafood, is skeptical about the new renovations planned for the Southwest.

“It’s been talk of this for at least 25 years, but I’ve not see anything yet, so it makes you wonder,” he said.

Even with the hope of renovation to renew businesses in this area, Kim still said he faces many problems.

Because all the businesses around him have been owned by the same family for many generations, they already know how to run a business.

Nancy Heller remembers teaching a 6-year-old boy with noncommunicative autism to ride. On that particular day, she decided to have him ride with a bareback pad, which helps with movement, on Forrest, a brown bay pony in his 20s.

The exercise was called “Around the World,” where the rider puts one foot over the front of the horse and rides side saddle. The feet are on the side and one foot is on the back so the rider is basically riding backwards. After the boy went around the arena, he took his finger and made a circle with it and pointed toward the horse’s ears.

Heller, now a therapeutic horseback riding instructor at Potomac Horse Center in Gaithersburg, Md., took this to mean the boy wanted to turn frontwards. She moved his leg over the rump in the same direction he moved his finger in a circle, in order to let him know she was understanding what he was trying to communicate.

“Big smile, like he had overcome his fears and that he communicated to me and I understood what he was saying,” Heller said.

He took his feet out of the stirrups and then he signed “Finished.”

Heller was so happy because the boy usually babbles and mimics signing, but this time he communicated. Heller was really proud. The boy’s caregiver, who was watching the whole time, was thrilled. He didn’t need assistance tapping his feet against the horse.

“I’ve never had a breakthrough like this before,” Heller said.

For Heller and other experts on equine therapy in the Washington, D.C., Metro area, this and many other similar stories reinforce something they say humans have known for centuries: Horses have a unique ability to help people with therapy and rehabilitation from physical and psychological ailments.

Therapeutic riding began around 5th century B.C. in ancient Greece, when wounded warriors used horses for therapy and rehabilitation, said Marty Leff, a NARHA advanced certified therapeutic horseback riding instructor and one of the founders of the therapeutic riding program at Potomac Horse Center In Germany, horses were used for physical therapy, especially after World War I and II.

“Building a relationship with an animal is very rewarding in many aspects,” said Heller, a registered certified therapeutic horseback riding instructor who has been at Potomac Horse Center for nearly six years.

When those with an emotional, social or psychological disability are given trust and loyalty from a horse, they feel very important and their self-esteem rises, she said. The reassurance allows riders to extend their relationship with horses to personal relationships with other people, she added. “Horses also help people feel in control of their situation because there is a direct correlation between action and reaction.”

Horses mirror and read the rider’s emotions and body language. Horses cannot lie. These characteristics aid the human therapist or instructor, as well as human assistants, by letting them know exactly what’s going on with the rider in attitude, personality and emotions almost immediately. Horses change a rider’s awareness of his or her surroundings so the rider can be more attentive and engage with others where they wouldn’t interact with anyone at all, said Colleen Murphy, a physical therapist who used to work in the D.C. area but who now owns a private practice in Kentucky that focuses on sensory processing.

Horses help the human therapist or instructor find hidden emotions and issues in a more proficient and accelerated manner, which aids the rider and the therapist in developing problem-solving skills. Most times, riding a horse and contact with the horse are motivators forcing riders with noncommunicative autism to sign or verbally communicate, said Davorka Suvak, the program director at SPIRIT Open Equestrian Program in Herndon, Va.

For those with autism who are also noncommunicative, they physically connect and thus communicate with the horse and eventually learn to communicate with people. The noncommunicative autistic learn to focus on something outside themselves, interact with other people and respond to verbal cues from the instructor to complete specific tasks, Suvak said. Thus, horses give those in the noncommunicative spectrum of autism a voice.

According to Susan Avjian, a hippotherapist for more than 20 years who worked with students with autism at the Katherine Thomas School in Rockville, Md., horses not only heal physical ailments, but also fill gaps of emotional need.

A woman with mutiple sclerosis made a goal to be able to walk down the aisle on her wedding day. After a period of therapy, walking down the aisle didn’t look like it was going to be possible for her, but she had a plan. The wedding party knew about it, but the guests didn’t. The horse center where she went for therapy sessions worked with her and she was able to ride a therapy horse down the aisle.

“For her to be able to not be bound her wheelchair was just a phenomenal experience,” Avjian said. “It was just such a wonderful way for her to do something different, to feel more like everybody else and to have something special in her life on her wedding day.”

To Avjian, the bride was an example of why equine therapy is important.

Defining equine therapy

Some believe the theories behind horse therapy developed from Gestalt Therapy, a psychotherapy in the 1950s focusing on the individual’s experience in the moment, the therapist-client relationship and the environmental and social contexts in which these things take place. In 1969, the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association (NARHA) was founded for those with physical disabilities. The Equine Facilitated Mental Health Associated became a branch of NARHA in 1996 to cater to those with nonphysical disabilities.

The expanse of what horse therapy actually covered became so vast, from grooming a horse to vaulting (a running jump over an obstacle on horseback), that NARHA only goes by the acronym now. NARHA also changed the official term for equine therapy to equine-assisted activity and therapy (EAAT). EAAT has only become more widely recognized in the last four years, and horse therapy terms are constantly changing.

In therapy involving horses, the horse can be seen as the teacher, the assistant or the tool. “Working with horses provides the therapist with an object in the space on which to promote projection and identification,” said Dr. Elisabeth Reichert, a social work professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill.

The goals that are to be achieved are basically the same in an equine environment as it is in the clinic. Avjian said the only difference is the tool or equipment.

In the clinic, a therapist is limited to inanimate objects, such as a swing or ball. In an equine environment, the horse and the arena are the tools. Horses offer a recreational component for motivation that dead objects can’t. The motivation assists the rider to carry their skills into the functional realm of their everyday lives, she added.

“We’re treating our clients in a very holistic way. We don’t just slice it and say I’m a PT, and OT, I’m this or that,” said Avjian. “The whole body works together and we incorporate it all. Any good instructor or therapist is going to look at things in that way as well.”

According to Murphy, America’s health care system of payment requires therapists to segment into small areas. A good therapist works on improving every part of the rider, she said. “We’re all doing the same things, we’re just writing the goals up in different ways to kind of slant toward our profession.”

A proper horse therapy session for students who can’t ride on their own involves five humans: the lead next to the horse’s head, two spotters on each side of the horse, the student on the horse’s back, and the therapist at the center of the arena or moving alongside the horse.

At Potomac Horse Center each student gets half an hour of riding. Adjusting the stirrups and feeding the horse is part of the allotted time. Heller employs 19 horses for therapy in the small arena. She has 30 students. One-third of them have autism, one-third have a learning disability of some sort and one-third have something that doesn’t fall into those categories. Students as young as 5 years old can ride under Heller’s supervision, but she makes exceptions. Currently, her youngest student is 3 years old and her oldest student is 59.

“To some people, it gets through to them where none of the other therapies do get through to them,” Heller said. “To some people, they’re just tired of the same old therapy in a room, especially physical therapy.”

Not only is equine therapy a more exciting form of therapy, but Murphy believes students gain tremendous self-esteem when they can maneuver a 1,000-pound beast. A 3-year-old former student of hers has only been speaking in one or two-word sentences and after his first day of leaving hippotherapy, he got back into the car with his mom and said, “Want Costco, slice of pizza.” It was the longest sentence he had every communicated with his mom. And she was just incredibly teary-eyed and so excited for him to move over into the new domain of language.

All about horses

Horses are flight and instinct animals, but also majestic, large and powerful. For the noncommunicative autistic, a horse’s innate instincts are a huge benefit.

“Horses are so big that when someone who doesn’t have a lot of success in life is able to succeed on horseback, that’s really a big thing,” Leff said. “When you tell the horse to go left and it actually goes left—that’s a big deal.”

Horses can be intimidating, thus when riders accomplish any task involving a horse they overcome their fears and problems, establish and grow self-confidence and sometimes even begin healing and curing the issue at hand.

There are horses who take advantage of the helpless and then there are generous and kind ones that are born to do therapy, she said.

“My therapeutic horses were my other set of hands,” Leff said.

Her first requirements for a horse is soundness and attitude. She tests to see if the horse is therapy material by jumping up from behind something and screaming at the horse. “You never know and if you have some kids from the extreme end of the autism spectrum, they can do all kinds of interesting things so the horse has to be close to bombproof.”

Leff started the therapeutic riding program at Potomac Horse Center in 1994. She wrote the groundwork manual, including therapeutic riding rules and guidelines, for the center’s program. She worked with the center on teaching people about horses and riding as well as how to care for a horse. Leff is involved with “remedial-psychoeducational and recreational riding and groundwork” and incorporated her extensive training in hippotherapy and sensory integration into the center’s curriculum.

Leff has had students who were afraid and had to be coaxed to get on a horse. But when they find themselves riding a horse, “they feel like they’re 1,000 feet tall,” she said. “What it does for self-esteem is just remarkable.”

One of her former students was a very bright girl — gifted but with severe learning disabilities, she said. During a school bus ride, a bunch of boys were bullying another student. The girl got up, told them to sit down, behave and leave the other student alone.

“I figured if I can ride a 1,000 pound horse, I can tell a couple of 100-pound boys to behave,” the girl said.

While riding a horse improves the rider’s circulation, muscle control and coordination, Suvak said, the more important aspects include “a very profound bond riders develop with their horses.” Horses are companion animals, attuned to the smallest movement, attitude and emotion, she said. They look to their riders for direction and love.

Horses are simple creatures. They aren’t demanding. They want to understand their riders and want the riders to understand them.

“Because of the love and trust they give, their fine-tuned responses, and desire to please, they are extremely effective in creating a bond with autistic riders that encourages communication and interaction,” she added.

Equine versus clinic therapy

Children with some form of autism in the pre-school years can greatly benefit from a combination of therapies and experiences, said Virginia Kane, director of occupational therapy at Skill Builders, a speech-language and occupational therapy organization in Arlington, Va.

According to Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a well-known psychologist in the D.C. metro area, parents should spend the money they would have for their children’s college on establishing skills during the pre-school years for children with autism so that they may have the opportunity to even think of college.

“So much can happen before they get to kindergarten,” Kane said. “Children with autism are very oftentimes involved in occupational therapy for work on their sensory motor skills, body awareness—so they can have a better sense of how to interact with other bodies.”

They’re also getting speech therapy coupled with play therapy or psychology counseling in order to figure out all the effects autism has on the individual, she added.

At the elementary school age, a child should be able to handle the school day, sit upright at a desk, lift their head up and look at the board and write. Occupational therapists help children work on trunk control, shoulder and wrist stability, finger skills and insolated control of the muscles. Riding a horse helps those slower in learning develop trunk control by encouraging good posture with a straight back, Kane said.

Skill Builders sees many children with sensory processing issues, sensory integration dysfunction and learning disabilities, either coupled with sensory integration dysfunction or as the main problem.

Sensory processing is essential to normal functioning. The three primary sensory systems are vestibular, proprioception and tactile. According to Murphy, when a person has sensory processing disorders, the person usually has problems in all three areas. “The proprioception has a bigger job than just knowing where our body is,” she said. “It is also the input that regulates our sense of being. It’s a very regulatory input. Those are direct links into the brain.”

Therapy in a clinic also involves visual perception and visual motor activities. “We do a lot with bilateral coordination because in OT we look at providing a child with a good sensory motor foundation,” Kane said. “If they don’t have the good core muscle strength, the right-left coordination in their bodies, theoretically it’s more difficult to get refined left-to-right across the paper.”

Therapy focusing on visual development assists a noncommunicative rider with autism, who never looks in the eye of individuals or who is very ego-centric, to think of somebody else, Murphy said. “Part of the riding is brushing the horse and taking care of the horse and it starts to move them out of ‘me me me’ to a ‘we.’ ”

In a clinic, a therapist would use a pencil to gauge the student’s awareness of their muscle and joint position, and knowledge of how tightly and efficiently the student is using the pencil. In an equine setting, the horse therapist or instructor uses a horse to find and develop the rider’s self-awareness of their bodies. Sensory processing is the base on which the rider builds a good knowledge of his or her body to even go off into other areas, Murphy said. “There has to be a strong sensory core to have good self-esteem.”

Equine therapy: the positives, negatives

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2009 ADDM autism prevalence report concluded the prevalence of autism had risen to one in every 110 births in the United States and almost one in 70 boys. The news was not a surprise to the Autism Society or to the 1.5 million Americans living with the effects of autism spectrum disorder. Nonetheless, the spotlight shown on autism as a result of the prevalence increase opened opportunities for the nation to consider how to serve these families facing a lifetime of supports for their children.

The Autism Society estimates the lifetime cost of caring for a child with autism ranges from $3.5 million to $5 million, and the U.S. is facing almost $90 billion annually in autism costs (including research, insurance costs and non-covered expenses, Medicaid waivers for autism, educational spending, housing, transportation, employment, and related therapeutic services and caregiver costs).

Leff doesn’t think horse therapy is the most cost-effective form of therapy, but the cost of non-horse therapy is comparable to horse therapy, especially when you’re paying for a horse, instructor, horse care and overhead, she said. “But I think that it’s an expensive sport and that is the problem with it and I don’t know any way we’re going to get that included in the health bill.”

On the other hand, Murphy and Avjian believe the field of horse therapy is becoming more widely accepted by scientific communities. According to Murphy, the DSM is recognizing sensory processing, which leaves insurance companies no choice to to pay for services. In turn, a wide variety of therapy, including equine, that has not been presently accepted will become available.

According to Murphy, the pricetag for an hour of equine therapy in D.C. is somewhere in the $120 to $130 range. Potomac Horse Center charges $61.50 for a 30-minute private lesson. Riders can buy a package of 10 or 12 lessons, which is cheaper at $58 per lesson coming to a total of $580 for 10 weeks.

“One thing that you find as a parent is if your child needs something, you will do anything to try to help your child,” Avjian said. “If they’re hurting, in pain—if you think there’s something that could improve their quality of life and functioning, you are going to do it.”

Getting second mortgages on homes and borrowing money from wherever and whomever are some examples she mentioned. Avjian has seen many parents making sacrifices, no matter the cost, to pay for therapeutic horseback riding. Research is lagging in showing the benefits and effectiveness of horse therapy, but that will change with time, she added.

The future of equine therapy

Today, according to Leff, the majority of those with disabilities seeking horse therapy are in the autistic spectrum. Horse therapy is just as important as playing a sport or doing physical activities—something everyone needs, she said. “For a person with a disability who can’t walk normally, to be able to ride a horse is like, for us, to be able to fly.”

She added that sport and therapy are inseparable.

According to Heller, a person’s background is irrelvant when it comes to equine therapy. “Horses speak to everybody and there is psychotherapy and physical therapy, and socialization and directionality, especially for people with disabilities,” she said. “Horses can really teach you a lot if you’re willing to listen.”

One downside to equine therapy is it’s very much of a man-powered therapy. “Unfortunately, we see less and less volunteerism happening. I’m hoping that will not prevail and people will still be willing to give to others,” Avjian said. “I know here in the D.C. area or in Montgomery County, the students have to put in a number of volunteer hours to graduate—I think that’s great.”

According to Avjian, research is an integral component where more work needs to be done and restrictions, such as time and money, have prevented equine therapy from being widely-accepted. “When we look at things now, especially because things are so expensive, you want to get ‘the most bang for your buck’ and I think this is just a wonderful way to have so many people have a positive impact in their life from social, emotional and therapeutic standpoints of physical and sensory therapy.”